Seconds before the phone rings, my stepmother hands me a Fudgsicle. We stand in a small patch of light near the bathroom. She is in her nightgown, her short hair sticking up all over the place. She looks like a kid. “You really could be one of the Little Rascals,” I say, laughing. Sharon smiles and yells out “Otay!” as she turns to leave. The phone starts to ring, and we both walk down the hallway to see who it is. The caller ID shows an area code that could only mean my sister. Sharon groans.
“You’re it,” I say, one foot turned to leave the room. “Just tell me she is alive.” I say this every time there’s a call that could be Sarah. I hear Sharon say hello.
“Jack? Jack?” she says. “Slow down, what happened?” Something about her voice makes me pause in the doorway.
I ask, “She’s alive, right? Sharon?”
There is a noise that comes out of her. Then there are only fragments.
A book flies across the room.
Sharon asks if the paramedics can revive her.
My Fudgsicle, unopened, melts in its white plastic bag.
Jack wails through the phone.
“He thinks she’s been dead awhile. Her body—”
Her body. She has turned from my sister into a body.
Initial grief is so very loud. It fills up your head with a roaring, hapless noise. I can’t remember how my lungs work. The universe contradicts the body when someone dies.
Sharon hangs up the phone. For a moment I do not recognize her. Her face is grotesque with grief; her skin is gray, and her eyes are unfocused. Seeing her forces me back into my body; I cannot flee somewhere outside myself. There are things to do. I go up to her and hug my body against her shaking one. I take her by the shoulders.
“You can’t hurt yourself,” I command. She looks at me blankly. She is no stranger to suicidal ideation. “I mean it,” I say. “I can’t do this if you die.” When she doesn’t respond still, I place my hands on her chest and throat and let her feel my trembling skin. “You have to promise me you won’t kill yourself.”
“Okay,” she finally says, “I promise I won’t.” She takes my hands off her chest and holds them. “It’s all on you now.” She was just two years younger than me when her own sister died. Death has followed Sharon ever since. She knows that I alone will hold the weight of my family.
A heaviness presses against what is left of my heart. My mother is at her home, miles away from this house in the woods. She has no idea her daughter is dead. I will need to be the one to tell her.